


EXIT

by thefutureisbright



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Hospital, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Hospital Orderly Richie, Hospitals, M/M, Mentions of Blood, Mentions of Cancer, i honestly have no idea what else to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:35:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22619476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefutureisbright/pseuds/thefutureisbright
Summary: Mr Reitzman’s eyes were still open, and, had this been the first time Richie had come face to face with death’s prickly hand, he might have been shocked. Still a naïve young man whose only experience of death was the death of his hamster when he was nine, the first time Richie saw a dead body the predominant emotion he’d felt was confusion. Hollywood death, the death that’s illuminated on the silver screen, is powder-perfect and serene, bodies lying on tables, eyes closed demurely against the bright white light of the mortician’s lab, skin still a flushed petal-pink, even though their blood lay still and coagulated in their veins. Real death, the sort of death that comes creeping up on real people before pouncing and slashing and clawing and biting is … cold. Cold, stiff bodies, arctic-cold rooms with stacks of beginning-to-bloat bodies that are swiftly turning a grizzly grey colour, eyes that stare, glassy and cold. Cold. Richie was cold, and Mr Reitzman was cold. Richie tugged his open sweater closed, zipping it shut with a flourish. Mr Reitzman continued to stare at the ceiling, stare past the ceiling, stare into the void. The void stared back at him, reflected in his blown pupils.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 5
Kudos: 26





	EXIT

The noxious smell of formaldehyde and death hung in the air like smoke, but Richie, for the most part, didn’t smell it anymore. Perhaps in the morning, when he walked through the large blue double doors, ash on his tongue from the cigarette he’d abandoned on the wall outside, cherry slowly turning octopus-ink black, he’d smell it, and his nose would wrinkle automatically, but it never lasted. Soon enough, it would filter into his nose and sprout its tendrils, stoppering up all the tiny smell receptors, until Richie could never remember smelling anything _but_ that very specific odour that he’d smelt for the first time fifteen years ago, and had been smelling ever since.

The linoleum floor squeaked under his shoes. He squeaked down the labyrinthine corridors, passing nurses and doctors and people who were here now but wouldn’t be here tomorrow, he squeaked into the lift, he squeaked down more corridors, and he squeaked into the third floor staff room. His locker was the first on the left, the one with the broken door and the broken shelf, but he continued to bundle his meagre belongings into it anyway. He’d do this even though he knew that when the clock struck eight he’d stumble in here, exhaustion clogging his veins like cotton wool, and he’d pull the door open, and his trainers would smack him on the forehead vengefully. The locker door protested loudly, a great metallic whine, and Richie shoved his bag inside before slamming it shut again.

It was a Thursday morning. The clock struck six fourteen minutes ago, which meant that Richie was sixteen minutes early for work, for no other reason than he’d simply been bored at home. He’d woken before his alarm, almost an hour before his alarm, and had laid in bed almost petulantly, desperately trying to throttle sleep out of the slumbering body of the night, but it hadn’t worked. He’d quickly tired of staring at the small cracks that tumbled over each other on his ceiling, vein-like, so he had hauled himself out of bed, feet landing on the threadbare carpet with a soft thud. Wednesday night had become Thursday morning whilst Richie was still awake, and still he had woken before the rest of the world had even entered REM, eyes yet to flicker jubilantly behind velvety eyelids.

Richie wiggled his socked toes. The staff room was empty, save for three coats hanging, limp and lifeless, from the hooks that lined the wall. Change-over was in three minutes, when his manager would bustle into the room, eyebrows pre-emptively raised, the uniquely disappointed look that he only gave Richie. He was the arse-end of twenty, just over half Richie’s age, and yet, he was still able to turn Richie’s knees into the gelatinous chocolate pudding they serve in the cafeteria when his eyebrows shot up like startled caterpillars escaping a bird. The schedule tacked onto the flaky corkboard had his name written on every morning shift this week, Monday through to Friday and then Saturday and Sunday as an extra added ‘ _fuck you’_ to Richie and his bustling, raucous social life that didn’t exist.

When Richie had taken this job, fifteen years ago to the day, it had been a temporary stop gap. “ _Something to pay the bills,”_ he’d told himself and anyone who’d listen to him. The lady doth protest too much, the cricket on his shoulder would whisper casually to him, as the first week became the first month became the first year became the fifth year became ten years later and here he is, fifteen years later, older, greyer, wiser but only in ways that don’t count. Fifteen years an orderly, fifteen years a fucking fool in grey-white scrubs. ‘ _Are you the doctor?’_ people would ask, simpering and with reverence in their voices, humbled by the glow of the M.D.-halo hovering over Richie’s head, until Richie would point out that the light of the halo was just a dodgy lightbulb, and that he was, in fact, just the person they employed to push people around and clean up their piss. Then, the reverence would slide off their faces like butter, and all that would remain was apathy tinged with vague disgust.

The door burst open.

“Ah, Richard. Finally decided to join us, have you?”

“I was fifteen minutes early, Henry.”

“Patrick was _thirty-five._ Now, Mrs Jefferson’s knee hasn’t improved so she’ll need wheeling down to x-ray at nine, but before that you need to clean up …”

The rest of Henry’s impassioned speech, Julius Caesar to the deaf Roman Republic, dissolved into the stale air of the staffroom like sugar in water that Richie refused to drink. As quickly as he’d arrived, Henry was gone, leaving behind nothing but a list as long as Richie’s forearm that simply _had_ to be completed before Richie was allowed to disappear into the staff cafeteria to snatch at some feigned respite and to pretend that the meatloaf was anything but inedible.

With thirteen and a half hours to go, Richie stepped out of the staff room, and walked down the corridor, regulation crocs slapping the floor with every step.

* * *

When the interviewer had asked Richie why he wanted to be a hospital orderly, the answer that had come tumbling out of his mouth was well-rehearsed and only half a lie. He’d told the very bored looking man in the ill-fitting suit that he wanted to _help people, Sir,_ and that the job of a hospital orderly _perfectly suited his innate skill at problem-solving and would allow him to work with people who needed the most help, something I believe is so valuable, Sir, especially in the current nihilistic political climate, Sir._ The sweaty, uncaring man simply stared at Richie, rolled his eyes, and told Richie to show up at half six the next day, and not to bother showing up at all if he can’t deal with mopping up the piss and shit of elderly patients who can’t wipe their own asses. Richie had grinned, manic, wide, false.

Mr Reitzman’s eyes were still open, and, had this been the first time Richie had come face to face with death’s prickly hand, he might have been shocked. Still a naïve young man whose only experience of death was the death of his hamster when he was nine, the first time Richie saw a dead body the predominant emotion he’d felt was confusion. Hollywood death, the death that’s illuminated on the silver screen, is powder-perfect and serene, bodies lying on tables, eyes closed demurely against the bright white light of the mortician’s lab, skin still a flushed petal-pink, even though their blood lay still and coagulated in their veins. Real death, the sort of death that comes creeping up on real people before pouncing and slashing and clawing and biting is … cold. Cold, stiff bodies, arctic-cold rooms with stacks of beginning-to-bloat bodies that are swiftly turning a grizzly grey colour, eyes that stare, glassy and cold. Cold. Richie was cold, and Mr Reitzman was cold. Richie tugged his open sweater closed, zipping it shut with a flourish. Mr Reitzman continued to stare at the ceiling, stare past the ceiling, stare into the void. The void stared back at him, reflected in his blown pupils.

There’s a picture on the wall of the room. The hospital tries to keep the end-of-life rooms – the rooms where people are wheeled into in a wheelchair, blinking, and are wheeled out of on a gurney unblinking – as light and fresh as possible. The walls are a clinical white, the sort of white that displays blood and piss in gory, vivid technicolour, and the bedspread is white, and the floor is white and the curtains are white, like every other room, apart from in the end-of-life rooms, the light and fresh end-of-life rooms, there is a picture on the wall. 

Richie wonders idly whether the picture of a dozen small sheep grazing on a hillock made the rupturing of Mr Reitzman’s stomach any less painful, and whether the shepherd guarding the flock soothed him as his stomach acid dissolved him from the inside out.

The room is easy to clean. The mop glides over the floor, dances over the ice-white linoleum, and Richie hums tunelessly as it flies this way and that. Three other orderlies that Richie can’t name bustle in, heave Mr Reitzman’s rigor-mortised body onto a gurney, and wheel him out of the room, sheet placed pulled up and over his body, as if the sight of death would cause the whole world to scream in pain, in denial. In reality, Richie knows that the body will linger in the morgue until Mr Reitzman’s wife claims it, and then it will linger in the ground until the worms claim it, and then it will linger nowhere, forevermore.

Now, with nothing in the room but Richie, the bed, and the now redundant IV, the air feels warmer.

* * *

The end-of-life room only remained empty for as long as it took Richie to scrub the last remanences of life once lived out of the floor, before another life that was clinging to existence by a thread was bustled into the room. Where Mr Reitzman had been comatose for much of his stay, and had barely been able to grunt in Richie’s direction, the new end-of-life occupant was much more vocal.

“I want the _best_ doctor, Eddie-bear, the best doctor they can find, I don’t care if they have to fly him in from… from _Kentucky!_ Do you hear me, Eddie? _Edward,_ are you listening to me?” 

“Yes, Ma.”

The voice that spoke first was tea-kettle shrill, metal grating against metal, the sound of nails on a chalk board. It spoke with a nasally inflection that tugged at the ear, and warbled on without taking a breath. The voice that spoke second was small, retiring, reserved to the point of annoyance and Richie’s head whipped around as the screeching wheels of the wheelchair came to a halt just behind him.

“And who might you be? Are you the doctor?” The first voice implored, demanded, and Richie blinked.

“Richie Tozier, ma’am. Just an orderly, I’m afraid, you’ll have to –”

“ _Oh._ Well, fine. Fetch the doctor then, _go on,_ what are you waiting for?”

“ _Ma,”_ the second voice scolded, a verbal slap on the wrist that was as effective as a sugar placebo, “don’t be so rude.”

“Rude? Shut-up, Eddie. I’m _dying,_ or have you forgotten? That your own mother is about to shuffle off this mortal coil with a tangled gut? Is that it? You’ve _forgotten?”_

The owner of the second voice, a smallish man around Richie’s age with a pinched face and bruised, lifeless eyes, sighed.

“You know I haven’t forgotten,” the man – Eddie – replied, helping the nameless orderly lift his mother onto the bed with Promethean effort.

Richie watched dumbly from the corner of the room, mop clasped between his hands, as this pantomime of family duty continued to unfold before him. Eddie and his bleating mother seem to have forgotten that he’s there, nestled in the cheap seats, as they continue to speed through the first act of their tragedy. Richie doesn’t plan on sticking around for the fifth act finale.

Before he can slip out of the room unnoticed, Eddie catches him by the arm with calloused fingers.

“Hang on, wait a second,” Eddie said, but Richie pre-emptively shakes his head.

“Look man, I don’t know where the doctor is, the cafeteria is down the hall on the left, there’s a toilet through that door right there, I don’t know how long it’ll take her to die. Just,” Richie shrugged, hoping that the hopeless motion of his shoulders would communicate more than his words could ever dream to, “just leave me alone. I have another room to clean.”

Eddie dropped his hand from Richie’s arm as if Richie had suddenly combusted into hot, blue flame.

Two little words floated after Richie as he all but ran from the end-of-life room and those damn sheep grazing on that damn hillock, they chased him through the hospital as he scrubbed and cleaned and mopped, they followed him home that night, and they burrowed deep into his brain as he lay in bed, sleepless, staring at the ceiling, eyes fighting the dark.

“ _Thank you”_

* * *

The shrieking woman is still alive in the end-of-life room when Richie marches in the next morning, mop lodged safely under his arm like a musket. The man whose words had stalked Richie as he tossed and turned in his bed last night was slumped in the chair in the corner of the room. Family didn’t usually stick around. That was another thing that had thrown Richie when he’d first started here. He’d assumed that he’d be falling over the slumbering, weeping bodies of relatives who camped out in the wards, desperate to hold their loved ones in their arms as they slipped peacefully off to a better place. Death is a solitary experience, Richie had learnt this quickly. It happened in the middle of the night when relatives had gone home, when visiting hours were over and those who weren’t attached to machines with plastic tubing were tucking into their evening meals or fast asleep, wrapped in blankets and the womb-like comfort of unconsciousness. It happened in the middle of the day, when people were at work, faces buried in spreadsheets. It happened when the rooms were empty, silent, save for the laboured breathing of the person who was about to breathe no more. Death, for those who don’t die, isn’t an experience, it’s a discovery. The dead wait patiently for the living to have time to grieve.

The shrieking woman wasn’t shrieking when Richie shuffled in, she was asleep, snuffling and snorting like a newborn. Eddie looked up as Richie entered the room, before closing his eyes again.

Richie cleaned. Eddie breathed.

“What’s your name?”

The question came barrelling out of nowhere, cutting through the air like a knife through cheese.

“Uh, Richie. Richie Tozier, orderly extraordinaire, at your service,” Richie said, and Eddie let out a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a sob.

“Yes, yes, you told me yesterday. Look, Richie, I’m –”

Richie knew what was coming, he knew that he should stop Eddie from apologising for his mother, knew that the harpy lying in the bed was more trouble than Richie could even care to imagine, but he let Eddie continue anyway.

“I’m sorry about her. She’s … She’s scared.”

“Aren’t we all”

“I suppose so. She’s got cancer, lung cancer. The doctor said her lungs look like she’s smoked forty a day for twenty-five years, and that just set her off, “ _I’ve never smoked a day in my life! Dirty, dirty habit”_ and all that. She’s funny about that stuff. Do you smoke?”

The question wrapped itself around Richie’s legs and tugged, pulling him off balance.

“Yes, yeah I do, but don’t worry, I won’t – it’s against hospital policy to –”

“I do, too.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Started when she got diagnosed.”

“ _…Shit”_

Eddie laughed, properly this time, and it was an ugly sound, too high pitched and breathy, but it chiselled a smile out of Richie’s icy heart.

“Is that really fucked up? I don’t even like it, it tasted disgusting and it’s fucking with my asthma but … it seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Teenage rebellion twenty years too late?” Richie asked, wringing the mop out.

Eddie chuckled. “Something like that.”

The woman’s snuffling became moaning which became groaning which soon became loud, verbal protests which made Richie’s teeth itch, and sent Eddie skittering off to his mother’s bedside. 

“It _huuuuurts_ Eddie-bear! Fetch the doctor, fetch him _now,_ it _huuuuurts!”_

Richie took that as his cue to leave, the tragedy having steamrolled straight into Act II without him even noticing. He picked up the mop bucket, and left the room, but not before sending a quiet, “ _goodbye Eddie”_ over his shoulder.

The woman’s noisy protestations about her son befriending the janitorial staff followed Richie down the corridor, and Richie grinned.

* * *

The staff cafeteria of the hospital was hidden away behind a large white door marked with ominous red letters, _STAFF ONLY DO NOT ENTER_ , as if it was concealing something much more exciting than lukewarm casserole and stale bread rolls. Richie often found himself in there, choking down whatever food the chef had decided to punish them with on that given day, as he hid in the corner of the room, sat at a table that hadn’t been cleared for days. This lunchtime was no different. The table was covered in used plates and cookie wrappers, and Richie sat hunched over his phone, trying to crush candy in a desperate pretence at fun. A small knock at the door echoed out across the room, and Richie glanced around. He was the only person in the room. The knock sounded out again, louder this time, and again, and Richie groaned.

Food now abandoned to becoming cold and more inedible, he got up and slunk across to the door, before pulling it open.

Eddie was stood on the other side, wringing his hands.

“Hullo, Richie. I was wondering, y’see, she’s asleep again, and I’m … well, I’m bored of watching her breathe and listening to her fart.”

A spluttery laugh erupted from Richie, and Eddie grinned.

“Do you want to come in? I can offer you stew that tastes like nothing and apple cake that tastes like pork”

“… Sounds appetising. Are you sure I can come in?” Eddie asked, gesturing to the ominous message on the door.

Richie shrugged. “It’ll be fine, and if anyone _does_ ask, I’ll just tell them you’re interviewing me.”

“For what?”

“Orderlies Weekly, Orderlies Monthly, a podcast about menial labour jobs, some shit like that, I don’t know. Look, do you want this apple cake or not?”

* * *

When things take a turn for the worst, you can feel it in the air. Outside the room of the nearly-dead, the air ripples violently, as if preparing to absorb the energy of a life expended, and the cold creeps in, slowly at first, unnoticeable, but before long the room is frigid, held tightly in the gaping maw of Death, who won’t wait much longer. The air shifts around Sonia Kaspbrak’s room at four in the afternoon on the Tuesday after she’s admitted, and the tragedy reaches its climax. The medication has stopped working entirely, both the painkillers and the last ditch attempt at shrinking the cancerous squatters currently making the cavities in her lung their home. She’s left, bereft of all chemical comforts, to fend for herself, to will her broken, bruised, rebellious body to spare her some pain, to ease her into the sweet sleep of death without too much discomfort, but her body, as it is wont to do, proves stubborn. She moans in her sleep, grasping at her chest with arms on auto-pilot, as if she might rip through the papery skin on her clavicle and grasp her lungs, patch them up, make them work. Eddie watches her writhe in her bed, and Richie watches Eddie.

Eddie has barely moved from the chair for two days and two nights. He’s pushed it right up against his mother’s bed, crushed as close as he can possibly get to the metal bed frame, and he sits rigid in it, standing vigil over his mother’s sleeping body, as if he might catch her last breath, as if he might shock her stuttering heart into life one last time. He’s all but mute, nodding wordlessly to doctors who speak rapidly, popping into the end-of-life room for nothing but a cursory nod at the dying mother in the bed, and the already mourning son clutching at her crow-claw hand.

“She’s on her way now, Edward,” they say, voices hushed and gentle but removed, always removed. “It won’t be long now.”

Act IV of the tragedy rips past in a blur. A blur of endless silence, the only sound being the slopping sound of the mop on the floor, and of the regular beeping of the machines. Eddie barely breathes. Richie breathes enough for the both of them.

* * *

"Coffee.”

The word is sour in Richie’s mouth, and he spits it out. It falls out wrong, and Eddie blinks.

“Pardon?”

Eddie’s voice is hoarse, and it cracks violently, as if it hasn’t been used for hours, maybe even days. Richie knows it hasn’t.

“Come with me. You need a break, you’ve been sat in that damn chair for days, Eddie. Coffee. My treat.”

Eddie gets up wordlessly. Richie, who had steeled himself in anticipation of a fight, exhales. As the barista is mixing their drinks, the air shifts violently, once, just once, as if Atlas has shifted his grip on the world, and Richie knows it’s happened.

“Eddie,” Richie says, and he reaches out and grabs Eddie’s hand from where it was resting on the table, “it’s going to be fine, okay? You’re gonna be fine.”

Eddie cocks his head, a dog confused at a command, but nods once, then twice, then his jaw is set and Richie knows he knows.

They get back to the room twenty minutes later and Sonia’s body is covered with a sheet. Her eyes stare up, open, unblinking.

Eddie doesn’t cry.

* * *

Cleaning the room is harder this time. Sonia’s body is removed almost immediately, and Eddie goes with it, eyes glistening with damp but no tears escape them. His voice wobbles but it doesn’t break. He is picture-perfect composure, and Richie is almost scared of him.

The room smells like bodies, the warmth of life hasn’t been chased out yet. This syrupy warmth makes the clean-up harder, changing the sheets sends beads of sweat down Richie’s spine, turning off the equipment has him panting and by the time he’s moving the chair back to the corner of the room he’s practically sobbing.

He doesn’t notice Eddie standing in the door way, a bunch of flowers clasped loosely in his hand, so Eddie coughs awkwardly.

“Richie?”

“Hiya, Eds,” Richie says, tears now streaming freely down his cheeks.

“These are for you,” Eddie says, thrusting the flowers at Richie. They’re a slapdash bunch of shocking reds and yellows and umbers, and they’re beautiful.

“Isn’t it supposed to be me who buys _you_ flowers?” Richie asks, taking the flowers in his hand and staring at them as if they held the secrets of life, the universe and everything. They smiled up at him.

“Isn’t it supposed to me be who cries?”

“Ah, you got me there. I just –”

“It’s weird, isn’t it.”

“It never has been before.”

“Did you know any of them before?”

“No, but I didn’t know your mother either.”

“You knew her about as well as I did,” Eddie says, and Richie is caught in a web of silence and something that claws at his gut, something he doesn’t understand, something he doesn’t want to understand.

“You were very kind to me,” Eddie continues, “and these, they’re from the shitty hospital gift shop, but these … these aren’t shitty.”

Eddie gestures at the flowers, and their tiny red and yellow heads seem to turn in Richie’s grasp, turn away from the white room, and the white floor, and the white curtains, turn away from the picture that hangs, melancholy and alone, on the wall, and they turn towards the sun.

The room feels warm, and Richie grins. 

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry it's short. Thank you if you read this, I know it probably wasn’t what you wanted it to be.


End file.
